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This article was first published on Channel News Asia.
SINGAPORE: Nearly four in five Singapore students under 18 believe that their schools should include media literacy classes in the curriculum.
They are also divided on the effectiveness of current efforts, a survey by global market research firm Milieu Insight has found.
Experts told CNA that media literacy classes have to be unique to capture the attention of the young.
FIGHTING AGAINST FAKE NEWS
Currently, schools and non-profit organisations rely on tools such as games to teach media literacy.
Non-profit agency TOUCH Cyber Wellness, for example, hosts online games to actively engage students in their learning.
This involves getting students to use their personal devices to participate in an online simulated game.
“They will go through puzzles to identify a particular imagery of, for example, an email or a text message, to identify what are the tell-tale signs that this might be a scam”, said Mr Shem Yao, manager of digital wellness at TOUCH Wellness Group.
While education is important, it is also essential to teach values around responsible sharing, said experts.
“Some young people like sharing things because they're funny, (and) it's going to humour their friends. But sometimes, that might be at the expense of whether that information is true to begin with,” said Professor Edson C Tandoc Jr, director of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet at Nanyang Technology University.
“If we let our children see that there are real and concrete negative effects of spreading unverified information, I think they will pay more attention.”
FAKE NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
The Milieu Insight survey found that over 60 per cent of youths under 18 have encountered fake news, with many of these coming from social media platforms such as Instagram or TikTok.
Nearly half of youths spend around three to four hours a day on social media, according to the survey.
“We find that the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they are to believe in examples of online falsehoods that we expose them to. So there really is something about social media,” said Prof Tandoc.
“The question is: How do we make children more mindful of what they get on social media? Do we monitor their use?”
The experts agreed that parents play a crucial role in protecting their children from the dangers of fake news, especially with the rise of deepfakes, which uses artificial intelligence to create convincing lookalike images, videos and audio recordings.
“Sometimes, some of these young people, when they're online, may get a call from someone using a deepfake tool to talk to them and pretending to be a family member or parent,” Mr Yao said.
“So we teach parents how to deal with that, how to have simple safeguard measures - like a family password - to help them realise that the person they are talking to is really not mummy or daddy.”
To help students identify and mitigate the impact of misinformation, the Ministry of Education organises media literacy classes through the Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) programme.
On average, schools conduct CCE lessons two hours per week.
They teach students to evaluate the credibility of an information source, and examine the impact of online falsehoods.
